Due to what has recently become an annual event at my house (the failure of my main summer tomato crop, which is another story) I was encouraged to plant the fourth greens garden flush for 2010 in mid-October. After installing a new plastic cold frame cover in early December, my family has harvested greens a half dozen times since then, with more waiting underneath the cover - plants don't grow very rapidly when the temperature outside barely reaches freezing for two weeks!  Though surprising to many people, somewhat established greens will survive freezing/thawing multiple times and resume their growth when temperatures rise even slightly.

I've been gardening in this area of our yard for 30+ years and the bed now measures 22'long X 3'deep X 33"high against the south wall of a now dilapidated shed. This very user friendly bed is super-deep with fertile, lushly friable soil from which I extract wheelbarrows full annually for potting medium - making room for more compost and worm castings. Because of its height, one does not need to bend over to work the soil or harvest the abundant production. My sowing method might be called random grouping - basically I gather all the intended seeds, which this fall included at least 15 lettuces, 4 or 5 kales, 3 spinach types, cilantro galore, arugula, cress, mizuna, various corn salad, mache, and Chinese winter greens together with a couple parsley starts. Then I just scatter the seeds over the prepared soil, coarsely rake them and press firmly into the soil by climbing up onto the bed and walking on the entire area followed by a good soaking with the harvested rainwater stored in the neighboring fish pond. For the next week to ten days the bed gets sprinkled lightly once or twice daily to keep the surface almost consistently moist, but not soaking wet. Within about 5 days the first arugula and cress sprouts appear with the rest following over the course of two weeks or so. As the sprouts gain in stature, some of them find their way into a salad bowl, while the remaining ones receive incremental amounts of composted mulch to retain the moisture provided by the drip irrigation lines.  Because my irrigation valves are in a protected, semi-heated location, it is possible to run the water in all but the coldest of weather.

The accompanying pictures illustrate how cold it has been for the last while, where the cold frame garden bed is in relation to the fishpond waterfall and an idea of what's growing inside. I expect to be able to periodically open the cover for a few hours during days in February with some cold loving greens beginning to bolt by the middle of March. This bed will have been producing luscious, vitamin & mineral packed baby and teenaged greens for nearly four months by that time, with heaviest mature production about to peak.